A recent addition to the ScanJet family, the ScanJet Pro 2000 s1 Sheet-feed Scanner ($299.99) is a capable low-volume document scanner comparable in capacity and features to the Editors’ Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C225, as well as the adept Brother ADS-2000e. The ScanJet 2000 is fast for the price, and its optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy is about average. It comes with a comprehensive software bundle consisting of top-drawer OCR and document and business card management programs, making it an exceptional value. In testing, it fell behind some competitors when saving to searchable PDF, but not enough to keep us from recommending it as a strong, inexpensive choice for small and micro offices and workgroups, or as a personal document scanner.

A sheet-feed, network document scanner, the Brother ImageCenter ADS-3600W ($799.99) offers excellent value, with a solid feature set and strong performance. It’s not as elegant, nor is its software as network-friendly, as the Editors’ Choice Canon imageFormula ScanFront 400. The ScanFront 400, however, sells for more than twice as much and is limited to Ethernet connectivity, while the ADS-3600W connects via USB, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and NFC in addition to Ethernet. It’s an easy pick as Editors’ Choice for midrange to heavy-duty network scanning in small and midsize offices and workgroups.

A step up from the $50-less-expensive HP ScanJet Enterprise 5000 s4, the ScanJet Enterprise Flow 7000 s3 Sheet-Feed Scanner ($849.99) scans faster and saves to image PDF quicker than many costlier competitors. But like many document scanners, including our Editors’ Choice, the Epson WorkForce DS-860, the ScanJet 7000 slows down considerably when saving scans to searchable PDF format—so much so that it’s not that much faster than the significantly lower-rated ScanJet 5000 when performing the same task. Even so, unlike some other competing models (including the DS-860), the ScanJet 7000 comes with both document management and business card archiving software, making it a terrific value and our new top choice for moderate to heavy-volume scanning in a medium-size office or workgroup.

I have to admit that prior to this gig; I honestly didn’t know that there were so many document scanners in the world—proof, of sorts, that the human race is still printing at an impressive rate. All of the major scanner manufacturers—Canon, Brother, Epson, and HP make several document scanners, ranging in different volumes and prices from a few hundred dollars to upwards of a thousand and beyond.

The good news is that most of them do a decent job, and most come with impressive bundles of optical character recognition (OCR) and document management software. Many Canon models, such as theimageFORMULA DR-M160II Office Document Scanner reviewed here last week, come with the company’s CaptureOnTouch software, as well as several third-party titles from Kofax and document management software from Nuance. Here, though, we are looking at a slightly lower-end machine, Canon’s $799 MSRP imageFORMULA DR-C240 Office Document Scanner.

The DR-C240 is a little slower DR-M160II mentioned above, and it lacks a document management program, per se (though it does come with PDF Pro Office for creating searchable PDFs), even so, it’ll get all butthe most demanding scan jobs done.

The other day we looked at Panasonic’s screaming $1,295 (MSRP) KV-S1057C Document Scanner, one of the fastest and most accurate text digitizing and cataloging systems I’ve seen in its price range. At the same time Panasonic released the KV-S1057C, it debuted another cheaper, slightly slower model, the $995 (MSRP) KV-S1027C Document Scanner, which provides most of the features of the more-expensive model and about two-thirds of the performance.

Today more than ever, banks, hospitals, car dealers, and so many others use dedicated document scanners to digitally preserve and file so many types of documents and data. To do so, of course, you need a scanner, and if you have many documents to scan, you’ll need a fast, high-volume scanner like the topic of this review, Panasonic’s KV-S1057C Document Scanner, to keep that blizzard of paper under control.

The fastest and most expensive in a pair of document scanners Panasonic released recently, the $1295 MSRP KV-S1057C is the fastest of the two. It’s less-expensive sibling, the KV-S1027C, is essentially the same scanner with an identical feature set—except that, as you’ll see in my review of the $895 MSRP KV-S1027C in a few days, it’s approximately two-thirds as fast as the $1300 KV-S1057C.

Whether you’re tasked with cataloging your company’s documents or digitizing you’re family’s finances and history, you’ll need a scanner. The good news is that Canon’s relatively new $399 (MSRP) is up to either task without breaking the bank. Not only does this scanner do a great job of scanning physically, but it comes with software and other features that streamline much of the scanning, processing, and saving process.

About.com Rating: 4 out of 5

If you’ve a backlog of documents you need digitized, or your business generates or receives hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of pages each month, a good document scanner is not an unreasonable purchase. The right machine and bundled software can all-but automate the entire process of digitizing and cataloging documents.

And that’s what we have here—a good scanner and bundled applications for scanning, converting to editable text (optical character recognition, or OCR), creating and saving a searchable PDF, and then cataloging with document management software—Epson’s $899-list WorkForce DS 6500 Document Scanner.

Surely, you’ve seen those commercials for NeatDesk scanners designed to help you scan and organize the business cards, receipts, and other bits of paper in your life? As easily the most well-known document scanner and digital filing system, much of the proprietary NeatDesk application consists of online services with annual fees that increase the overall cost of the solution. (Although, often you can find it with up-to three-month trial periods.)

The $499.95 (list) NeatDesk and the other “Neat” scanner products are designed with a high-level of hand-holding involved, and are most likely advantageous for those with the discipline to diligently scan and catalog their paper business cards, receipts, bills, and other business-oriented bits of paper. For those who may not need this level of supervision (or perhaps the additional fees are off-putting), the topic of this review, Fujitsu’s $495-list ScanSnap iX500, provides an alternative solution.